For many, many years now we have not had a long-term care facility in small communities funded. There were long-term care facilities built by the Housing Corporation and I do support what Member Beaulieu said, for example, that we need to work to make those rooms available to our elderly and other people who need those rooms in our communities as assisted living facility, which is what it was meant to do. So I don’t think there’s much change in what we are doing, what we have been doing in the Territories for the last 10 years.

What is different with the recent work that we have done is that the Department of Health, along with DPW, have done a long-term care planning, and the deputy minister can go into more detail on that.

I do understand that the NWT is different and unique and we need to do everything we can to support our local people to take on some of those jobs. We would like to do that. But we need to balance that with the risks and the other factors that we need to adhere to. It’s not something we have an option on. What we need to do is make sure that we can do a lot more to provide support and strengthen our system and resources in small communities so that our people take on those jobs to take care of our own local people, because the demands are just going to get more severe 10, 20, 30 years from now. We need to plan and we need to work harder to build the local resources. They don’t necessarily have to be a 24/7 long-term care facility. We need to do things differently to support our elderly and people who need our care.